I don't doubt that canaries fight, but who would pay to watch them? "Where were you last night George? Admit it! You were at the canary fights again!" Yeesh, I'd never want to be in a position where I'd have to admit that.
...why I buy books. It's either available (somewhere) or it isn't. I can either buy it or not. But once I own it, it's mine until I choose to get rid of it.
The problem I had with the Kindle all along is that Amazon has the ability to delete my purchases. Doesn't matter if they reimburse me, or if they feel really really bad about it afterwards, it was the ability to delete something I had purchased that was troubling, even if they never actually used the feature. Now, they have. It doesn't matter why, or that users got compensated, or that Mr. Bezos feels really really really bad about it.
Well, you know, I'm glad for you. We all know by now that the stability of Windows is due to many different factors. Not just the age of the hardware, but the type. Whether someone has flubbed and pushed out a poisonous update. Brand new hardware can work last week but segfault this week due to a bad automatic driver update. Yes, application interaction and version issues. (If it weren't for those darned applications, the OS would be so much more stable, yeah?) Or even having too many applications open, which is usually how I crash my machine. 3 gigs of memory just isn't enough headspace in this environment, another reason why I'm looking forward to Windows 7.
Parenthetically, I can't help but notice that you jumped directly from XP to 7, which is what I'm also planning to do.
It doesn't matter why spontaneous crashes happen, they demonstrably do. It remains to be seen how Microsoft deals with that in their stores. Or whether it'll have any impact at all, due to user expectations.
Wow, do you read what you're responding to? My work and home PCs do pretty well -- I only have to reboot them about twice a week. But although they are used heavily, they're not what one would say in continuous use -- those dynamic billboards are, and there are a lot of them, so the law of averages tends to catch up. Note the BSOD during the China Olympics, or just look around at an airport.
I have to wonder how many of the wall screens will be displaying BSOD or some other fatal error at any one time. You see it often at airports. Even our NOC center master display is showing a "fatal error" box three or four times a week.
On the other hand, people may be so used to it, they may not even notice.
No, Waldo. "Blowups Happen" was a (premature, somewhat unwarranted) cautionary tale about nuclear power. Magic Inc could be a cautionary tale about... lessee... nationalized health care. Yeah, that works for me. But Waldo (usually bundled with Magic Inc) was (at it's core) about human physical deterioration brought on by widespread broadcast power.
I miss Windows ME. I have fond memories of reinstalling it, doing registry backups, carrying around the 13 most common patches on floppy, disabling features that didn't work yet, it's lugubrious performance. Sigh... those were the days. As I approach my eighth year on Windows XP, I still occasionally take my ME media out and caress it.
C'mon, who are we kidding? ME was a joke, Bob was a joke, Vista was reductio ad absurdum. 95 was very nearly a joke -- I switched to NT 4 the moment it became available because I actually had to get some WORK DONE, something the OS engineers, in their enthusiasm, seem to sometimes forget.
Microsoft marketing needs to get over it. If they spent as much energy on the first service pack for Windows 7 as they did trying to retroactively justify Vista, they might really have something.
Remember the slogan Ford had for a long time: "Have you driven a Ford lately?" A clear admission that "yeah we put out some crap products in the past, but we've got our act together now". Doesn't that play a lot better, and give you more confidence in a company, than continuous denial in the face of indisputable consumer dislike?
This is not a cheap shot -- I depend on XP daily for my work and many of my hobbies. I've been test-driving the Windows 7 beta, and -- hey -- it's not half bad. Will be upgrading at least one of my machines on day zero, something I'd never have thunk of doing in 2007.
Look, Microsoft: I'm willing to forget Vista if you are. Keep bringing it up, and we'll keep bringing it up.
But do you think they would do that (support AJAX)? In their view, if they're down and you're up, you are displaying your webpage without their ads. That's clearly unacceptable, from their viewpoint.
In my experience (having 20/5 Mbit fibre to the house) is that it's almost never the website's local content that loads slow, it's the damned ads. Let me say that again so that we're clear -- I'm sitting there waiting not for the content I was seeking to load, but for the ads that I don't want to load. I know there's work-arounds for this -- I use some of them and they do help. But Fred and Ethyl Nongeek is not going to know about ad suppression. To them the 'net is "just slow" and they don't know why.
Making your local content lightning fast isn't going to help if your customers are waiting for unwanted content from some other website. And (grrrr....) this includes CAPTCHA! Sometimes it takes almost a half minute for the captcha image to come up, long after the rest of the login page has loaded.
The worst example, and a sign of things to come, was when Google Ads went down awhile back and took a bunch of websites down with it, including (as I remember) Slashdot. If your page included google ads, it just wouldn't load. I don't think AJAX is going to help with that. Feel free to disagree, but be specific.
> Let's see whether their actions going forward align with the words.
Of course not. Whether DRM is dead over the long term (which has been obvious to most of us here for some time) has absolutely nothing to do with current and near-future lawsuits. If the RIAA deliberately left money on the table, their masters would have their guts for garters. I mean, c'mon. If anything, they'd put on extra pressure to maximize revenue stream from the existing infrastructure (RIAA/MediaSentry/lobbying/etc) while it still had value. Sue the pants off everyone in sight while you still can, whilst simultaneously preparing some kind of exit strategy.
At least, that's what I'd do. If I were a shameless, evil bastard.
Wow, that's not at all what I said. Apple is not required to provide free support for products they don't sell. That would be insane. But there's a difference between support and access.
Well, for one thing, sifi and syfy are not correct. Sorry, they're just not. If we just accept every unnecessary simplification of the language, we'll be reduced to point-and-grunt in next to no time. (I know teenagers who are already in this state.)
I'm willing to a certain amount of suspension of disbelief for fiction, but for things that can actually hurt me, I require a reasonable amount of precision.
> From The Washington Post's Security Fix blog, the malware is 'designed to download a payload from a set of Web servers. Included in that payload is a Trojan horse program that overwrites the data on the hard drive with a message that reads "memory of the independence day," followed by as many "u" characters as it takes to write over every sector of every physical drive attached to the compromised system.'
Did the washington post writer get this wrong, or is this a misreported urban legend? The "trojan horse" part doesn't make any sense -- the computer is already compromised.
> That's not quite right -- the game is being set in 3015, which is before the Clan invasion, and so it's unlikely you'll see any Clan technology in the game.
That sucks. The clans were cool. I miss my timberwolf. Why this fascination with the inner sphere? Are there trademark issues? If it's a true reboot, you ought to start in Wolf Clan, dammit.
> Actually, yes; in the BattleTech universe, centuries of warfare have caused the loss of quite a bit of scientific knowledge and technology. That's why Clan technology was so much more advanced than the Inner Sphere stuff.
Right, but even the super-advanced Clan stuff had you line up your shots by hand. Star travel, cloning, compact nuclear power, beam weapons, particle weapons, compact rail guns, effective anti-missile defenses, (which has to have some pretty sophisticated electronics) giant robots with articulate arms, and you shoot by... turning your mech so the hood ornament lines up with your opponant... don't forget to lead him a little... you have to guess how much because this super-advanced 31st century killing machine doesn't have no frikkin targeting electronics. Bleh.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't doubt that canaries fight, but who would pay to watch them? "Where were you last night George? Admit it! You were at the canary fights again!" Yeesh, I'd never want to be in a position where I'd have to admit that.
The problem I had with the Kindle all along is that Amazon has the ability to delete my purchases. Doesn't matter if they reimburse me, or if they feel really really bad about it afterwards, it was the ability to delete something I had purchased that was troubling, even if they never actually used the feature. Now, they have. It doesn't matter why, or that users got compensated, or that Mr. Bezos feels really really really bad about it.
Mod him up.
Well, you know, I'm glad for you. We all know by now that the stability of Windows is due to many different factors. Not just the age of the hardware, but the type. Whether someone has flubbed and pushed out a poisonous update. Brand new hardware can work last week but segfault this week due to a bad automatic driver update. Yes, application interaction and version issues. (If it weren't for those darned applications, the OS would be so much more stable, yeah?) Or even having too many applications open, which is usually how I crash my machine. 3 gigs of memory just isn't enough headspace in this environment, another reason why I'm looking forward to Windows 7.
Parenthetically, I can't help but notice that you jumped directly from XP to 7, which is what I'm also planning to do.
It doesn't matter why spontaneous crashes happen, they demonstrably do. It remains to be seen how Microsoft deals with that in their stores. Or whether it'll have any impact at all, due to user expectations.
The next step, you know, is to blame the user.
Wow, do you read what you're responding to? My work and home PCs do pretty well -- I only have to reboot them about twice a week. But although they are used heavily, they're not what one would say in continuous use -- those dynamic billboards are, and there are a lot of them, so the law of averages tends to catch up. Note the BSOD during the China Olympics, or just look around at an airport.
I have to wonder how many of the wall screens will be displaying BSOD or some other fatal error at any one time. You see it often at airports. Even our NOC center master display is showing a "fatal error" box three or four times a week.
On the other hand, people may be so used to it, they may not even notice.
No, Waldo. "Blowups Happen" was a (premature, somewhat unwarranted) cautionary tale about nuclear power. Magic Inc could be a cautionary tale about... lessee... nationalized health care. Yeah, that works for me. But Waldo (usually bundled with Magic Inc) was (at it's core) about human physical deterioration brought on by widespread broadcast power.
I miss Windows ME. I have fond memories of reinstalling it, doing registry backups, carrying around the 13 most common patches on floppy, disabling features that didn't work yet, it's lugubrious performance. Sigh... those were the days. As I approach my eighth year on Windows XP, I still occasionally take my ME media out and caress it.
C'mon, who are we kidding? ME was a joke, Bob was a joke, Vista was reductio ad absurdum. 95 was very nearly a joke -- I switched to NT 4 the moment it became available because I actually had to get some WORK DONE, something the OS engineers, in their enthusiasm, seem to sometimes forget.
Microsoft marketing needs to get over it. If they spent as much energy on the first service pack for Windows 7 as they did trying to retroactively justify Vista, they might really have something.
Remember the slogan Ford had for a long time: "Have you driven a Ford lately?" A clear admission that "yeah we put out some crap products in the past, but we've got our act together now". Doesn't that play a lot better, and give you more confidence in a company, than continuous denial in the face of indisputable consumer dislike?
This is not a cheap shot -- I depend on XP daily for my work and many of my hobbies. I've been test-driving the Windows 7 beta, and -- hey -- it's not half bad. Will be upgrading at least one of my machines on day zero, something I'd never have thunk of doing in 2007.
Look, Microsoft: I'm willing to forget Vista if you are. Keep bringing it up, and we'll keep bringing it up.
Wow, talk about losing touch with reality...
> "and the use of Windows on nuclear submarines"
I suspect that's a little opinionating on the part of the author, but it sure is funny.
But do you think they would do that (support AJAX)? In their view, if they're down and you're up, you are displaying your webpage without their ads. That's clearly unacceptable, from their viewpoint.
In my experience (having 20/5 Mbit fibre to the house) is that it's almost never the website's local content that loads slow, it's the damned ads. Let me say that again so that we're clear -- I'm sitting there waiting not for the content I was seeking to load, but for the ads that I don't want to load. I know there's work-arounds for this -- I use some of them and they do help. But Fred and Ethyl Nongeek is not going to know about ad suppression. To them the 'net is "just slow" and they don't know why.
Making your local content lightning fast isn't going to help if your customers are waiting for unwanted content from some other website. And (grrrr....) this includes CAPTCHA! Sometimes it takes almost a half minute for the captcha image to come up, long after the rest of the login page has loaded.
The worst example, and a sign of things to come, was when Google Ads went down awhile back and took a bunch of websites down with it, including (as I remember) Slashdot. If your page included google ads, it just wouldn't load. I don't think AJAX is going to help with that. Feel free to disagree, but be specific.
Didn't I see that in a James Bond film a few years ago?
> Let's see whether their actions going forward align with the words.
Of course not. Whether DRM is dead over the long term (which has been obvious to most of us here for some time) has absolutely nothing to do with current and near-future lawsuits. If the RIAA deliberately left money on the table, their masters would have their guts for garters. I mean, c'mon. If anything, they'd put on extra pressure to maximize revenue stream from the existing infrastructure (RIAA/MediaSentry/lobbying/etc) while it still had value. Sue the pants off everyone in sight while you still can, whilst simultaneously preparing some kind of exit strategy.
At least, that's what I'd do. If I were a shameless, evil bastard.
Wow, that's not at all what I said. Apple is not required to provide free support for products they don't sell. That would be insane. But there's a difference between support and access.
> I'm sorry, but where does it say that Apple must support every player on the market with iTunes?
To my knowledge it doesn't say that anywhere. But there's a difference between "support" and "access".
Chain the cards to truck wheels, like the bathroom key at the service station.
Yeah yeah... That was so two years ago...
Only if physical survival was the goal this time. I was so disappointed the first time I saw Survivor. "You mean the losers get to live? What a scam!"
> Aren't they supposed to spontaneously self-destruct when this happens?
Oh, if only.
Well, for one thing, sifi and syfy are not correct. Sorry, they're just not. If we just accept every unnecessary simplification of the language, we'll be reduced to point-and-grunt in next to no time. (I know teenagers who are already in this state.)
I'm willing to a certain amount of suspension of disbelief for fiction, but for things that can actually hurt me, I require a reasonable amount of precision.
> From The Washington Post's Security Fix blog, the malware is 'designed to download a payload from a set of Web servers. Included in that payload is a Trojan horse program that overwrites the data on the hard drive with a message that reads "memory of the independence day," followed by as many "u" characters as it takes to write over every sector of every physical drive attached to the compromised system.'
Did the washington post writer get this wrong, or is this a misreported urban legend? The "trojan horse" part doesn't make any sense -- the computer is already compromised.
> That's not quite right -- the game is being set in 3015, which is before the Clan invasion, and so it's unlikely you'll see any Clan technology in the game.
That sucks. The clans were cool. I miss my timberwolf. Why this fascination with the inner sphere? Are there trademark issues? If it's a true reboot, you ought to start in Wolf Clan, dammit.
> Actually, yes; in the BattleTech universe, centuries of warfare have caused the loss of quite a bit of scientific knowledge and technology. That's why Clan technology was so much more advanced than the Inner Sphere stuff.
Right, but even the super-advanced Clan stuff had you line up your shots by hand. Star travel, cloning, compact nuclear power, beam weapons, particle weapons, compact rail guns, effective anti-missile defenses, (which has to have some pretty sophisticated electronics) giant robots with articulate arms, and you shoot by... turning your mech so the hood ornament lines up with your opponant... don't forget to lead him a little... you have to guess how much because this super-advanced 31st century killing machine doesn't have no frikkin targeting electronics. Bleh.